Chapter 3: The stepmother's greed...

Evelyn POV

"You want to know if I'm here to claim my prize?" I asked with false sweetness. "Here's my answer."

The engagement rings hit Adrian's chest with a satisfying thud before clattering to the marble floor. The sound echoed through the suddenly silent ballroom like gunshots.

Every conversation stopped. Every champagne glass paused halfway to painted lips. The only sound was my steady breathing and the soft drip of pool water from my ruined dress.

"I not only retrieved your ring," I said with a calm smile, "but I'm returning mine along with it."

Adrian's jaw tightened. He raised his eyes slowly, looking me up and down with contempt.

"Evelyn," he said icily, "if you're going to lose your mind, at least read the room. Today is the engagement party you desperately begged for."

Desperately begged for.

The words were chosen to remind everyone present that I was the pathetic one in this relationship. The woman who'd thrown herself at Adrian Whitmore so shamelessly that even his family had taken pity on her.

In my previous life, those words would have sent me scrambling. I would have rushed to pick up the rings, stammered about temporary madness, done anything to get back into his good graces.

Not this time.

"The engagement party I desperately begged for?" I let out a short laugh. "Then I can lose my mind however I want, can’t I? Besides —” I held his stare without blinking. “Even if I behaved perfectly, in your eyes, I’m just a substitute. Isn’t that right?”

Something flickered in his cold grey eyes… Surprise? Confusion? It vanished before I could place it, swallowed by his mask of indifference.

"I don't have time to fool around with you," he said in that maddeningly calm tone. "The ceremony is about to begin. If you still want to get engaged, go clean yourself up."

He turned to leave, dismissing me as easily as he would wave off a servant.

Rage flared in my chest. The assumption that I would come crawling back. That I had nowhere else to go. That no matter what he did, I would always stay. I opened my mouth to fire back when —

"Oh no, oh no, oh no!"

A shrill voice cut through the ballroom, stopping the words in my mouth.

It was Victoria Bennett, my stepmother.

She burst through the crowd in a blur of designer silk, her perfectly styled blonde hair bouncing with every panicked stride. A woman in her late forties who’d spent enough money on cosmetic procedures to fund a small hospital in her bid to look thirty and right now, every single year was showing through her makeup.

She nearly threw herself at Adrian's feet.

"I'm so sorry, Adrian! My daughter has lost her mind. Please don't hold it against her. She didn’t mean any of it. You know how emotional young women can be!"

Without waiting for a response, she dropped to her knees and began scrambling across the marble floor, searching for the engagement rings like a dog hunting for scraps.

The sight was both pathetic and infuriating. This woman, who had spent years pushing me toward Adrian like livestock to market, was now grovelling at his feet to keep the deal alive.

Adrian stepped back, disgust flickering across his face. Without another glance at either of us, he turned on his heel and walked away.

I moved to follow him. I wasn’t finished. There were things I still needed to say, words that had been rotting inside me across two lifetimes, but Victoria shot to her feet and grabbed my arm, her manicured nails digging into my wet skin.

"Are you out of your mind?" she hissed, yanking me close. "At such an important occasion, with so many people watching! Do you still want this engagement or not?"

Her eyes swept over me for the first time taking in my soaked dress, the ruined makeup, the hair hanging in wet ropes and her eyes widened with horror.

“What on earth have you been doing?” she demanded. “You look like a drowned rat! This is your engagement party, Evelyn, not a beach vacation. Why are you looking like you just crawled out of a sewer?”

I stared at her face, at the thinly veiled panic, the calculating eyes, that familiar hunger that had shaped every decision she’d ever made about my life and the memories came flooding back.

I remembered exactly when Victoria had discovered I had feelings for Adrian. The way her expression had transformed from indifference to excitement the moment she realised Adrian was a Whitmore.

From that day on, Victoria became my biggest cheerleader.

She coached me on what to wear, how to speak, and how to laugh. She was the one who'd first suggested I study Isabella's style. "Adrian likes elegant women, darling. Look at how Isabella dresses, that's what catches his eye."

She'd picked my outfits, chosen my lipstick shades, even adjusted the way I walked until I was nothing but a walking, breathing copy of another woman.

She never cared whether Adrian would love me. She only cared that he'd marry me and that my marriage would become her stepping stone to wealth and power.

And here she was, still playing the same game.

"Listen to me carefully," Victoria said now, leaning close enough that I could smell her perfume mixed with champagne. "You need to get cleaned up. After today, you'll officially be Adrian's fiancée. This is only the beginning, do you understand?”

I said nothing, and she took my silence as obedience. Her voice dropped into an eager whisper as she continued.

"From now on, you must seize every opportunity to please Adrian. Dress the way he likes, act the way he prefers; never give him a single reason to look elsewhere." Her fingers tightened on my arm. "And most importantly you need to get pregnant as soon as possible. Once you're carrying the Whitmore heir, Adrian won't be able to leave you, no matter what. Do you understand what that means, Evelyn?"

She leaned in more, until I could see every pore beneath her foundation. “Think of it, Evelyn. Think of all the endless wealth and glory for our family!”

Endless wealth and glory.

In my previous life, those exact words had been the leash Victoria used to lead me to my own destruction. Endless wealth and glory had bought me nothing but suffering, humiliation, and a death nobody mourned.

I looked down at myself for the first time since my rebirth. Even tonight, at my own engagement party, I was dressed exactly like Isabella. The same style of gown she'd worn to the Whitmore charity gala last month. The exact shade of lipstick she preferred. The same hairstyle Victoria had insisted would "remind Adrian of his childhood sweetheart."

I remembered the disgust in Adrian's eyes every time he looked at me in my previous life. Not because I wasn't beautiful enough, but because my very existence was an insult, a cheap knockoff standing where the original should have been.

Everyone knew Adrian had loved Isabella since childhood. If not for a business dispute between the Clarke and Whitmore families, and if not for Margaret Whitmore's strange fondness for me, Adrian would have married Isabella years ago.

I was only here because his mother had pressured him into it. A consolation prize he’d been forced to accept. The woman who could produce Whitmore heirs while his heart belonged to someone else.

Victoria was still talking, painting her fantasy of our golden future.

"...the Whitmores control half the city's real estate. Once you're family, your father's company will flourish. Our social standing will be completely transformed. All you have to do is be a good wife, give him a son, and we’ll never have to worry about anything again—"

Her voice faded.

The ballroom blurred.

Suddenly, I wasn't standing in a grand hall anymore; I was back in that warehouse, gasping for air as rough hands tightened around my throat. Through a grimy window, Adrian and Isabella exchanged vows under a shower of fireworks while I bled on a concrete floor.

I couldn’t breathe. My hands flew to my neck as I felt fingers digging into my skin and the taste of blood and dust in my mouth. I could hear Adrian’s voice ring out.

Even if Evelyn dies, it doesn't matter.

I gasped, and the ballroom rushed back. The chandeliers. The champagne. Victoria's greedy, excited face inches from mine, still whispering about wealth and glory.

Hatred surged through me until my entire body trembled with it.

I raised my head slowly and stared directly into Victoria's eyes.

The smile on her face faltered.